50 Years of Video Games: The Last of Us (PS3)
No matter how good your game’s story may be, getting certain players to pay attention to it can be almost impossible. Some people really do only care about the interactive elements of a game and will skip right past every cutscene even if it makes the experience make little sense, but despite this, the 2013 game The Last of Us seemingly reached many players with its narrative and its emotional impact was felt by those who normally don’t care for a game’s plot. Part of this was certainly because developer Naughty Dog already had beloved franchises behind it like Crash Bandicoot, Jak & Daxter, and Uncharted to ensure players trusted them enough to give the narrative focus a shot, but perhaps an even more powerful tool was its devotion to immersion. Moments of interactive play are devoted to establishing character personalities and histories rather than always being about exciting or tense action, and so once the game does take control away from you to show a cutscene, it has laid important groundwork during the gameplay to ensure your investment.
The game begins not with you already steeped in its post-apocalyptic setting with its fungal twist on zombified humans but instead playing as a young girl on the day the Cordyceps infection truly makes civilized life as we know it untenable. Before you ever pick up a gun you have experienced a well designed moment of danger and vulnerability, and with the game working hard to ensure there’s still a strong survival element even as you become more capable as the game’s true main character Joel, the establishment of tone was key to preparing you for the cut ahead to twenty years down the line. The United States’s government has taken extreme measures in trying to contain the fungus, turning small segments of cities into quarantine zones and leaving everything outside of it to handle the fungal zombies on their own. Joel has eked out a living in Boston engaging with black market deals to make ends meet in the declining society, but one deal that comes his way forces him out of relative safety as he’s the only one available to deliver a teenage girl named Ellie cross country. Ellie seems to be the only hope for a possible vaccine to the fungal infection, and while Joel at first has no interest in the job beyond the expected payout, much of the game focuses then on their road trip and the slow but satisfying development between the pair as it becomes almost like a father and daughter relationship.
When things kick off Joel is certainly a grouchy and self-centered figure jaded by the tragedies that lead up to his rough life in Boston while Ellie is a young and angry girl who has only known a life under the deteriorating conditions in the United States. The travel across America and those they encounter though begin to draw out more from the both of them, small moments giving the player peeks at their history or glimpses at their softer and more personal sides. Seeing Ellie come to a halt to marvel at something as simple as fireflies reminds the player of her youth and inexperience even though at other times she might be forced to jab a knife into a man’s chest to save her own life. Joel will run into characters from his past where they have clear histories that the game doesn’t take time to explain but it feels natural in doing so, these people clearly having an understanding built from a layered past that doesn’t need to be explored in detail to feel believable. There is a fairly smart economy in how the game divides its attention so that this post-apocalyptic future feels fleshed out without having to devote too much time to exposition or exploring every moment of the two’s journey. Key events are given focus rather than having you participate in every part of travel and while there are optional moments of interaction like seeing how Ellie and Joel comment on something found in the ruins of old towns and suburbs, moments where the game draws your attention to something usually help the gradual growth of the characters without it either feeling too slow or rushed. There are certainly some moments that could have used a bit more room to breathe though. At one point you work with two brothers to escape a city held by well-armed bandits, Henry giving Joel someone on his level to talk to and Ellie able to embrace her inner child a bit by interacting with Sam since they’re the same age. A good portion is spent with them but the game speeds through the end of that section to head onto the next area, the impact of the departure not as strong for its suddenness. The key moments for Ellie and Joel are given the time they need both during gameplay and cutscenes though to ensure that the finale can provide an intensely emotional climax, so fast tracking through other interactions might have been a worthy sacrifice to prevent straying too far from the story’s core.
The world in decline seen in The Last of Us has a melancholy beauty to it, the game offering a good range of areas to explore that are different enough to be memorable. Plant life has begun to reclaim places abandoned in the move away from areas full of the infected and the gradual decay of urban structures allows for rooms to be reshaped by how walls have crumbled and ceilings have caved in. The intrusion of nature on these spaces gives these sometimes sobering depictions of the dark fate many experienced an injection of lovely detail, and while you can see the artificiality of game design in some areas where a lot of convenient cover is laid out for an upcoming gun fight, you also get areas whose look is solely devoted to a believable representation of how a place would have changed after twenty years of abandonment. Navigating these spaces in the quiet moments between gun fights with survivors or stealthy avoidance of incredibly lethal infected is made a bit more interactive than marveling at the setting design though. There are helpful materials to find scattered about, usually in the form of junk that can be used to upgrade your weapons or craft things like health kits and improvised explosives. Scrounging for scrap isn’t too constant a presence that you always feel like you’re needing to poke around but there are some notes left by people to better highlight the general way people responded to the slow decline of society. Unfortunately, while there are some more involved moments of making your way through an area, an emphasis on resourceful solutions to having no path forward more often manifests as doing the same thing. Players will often be asked to find a nearby ladder, dumpster, plank of wood, or pallet to make a way forward, this task never really difficult or much of a puzzle. While it makes sense the world isn’t always accommodating with an immediate means of moving forward, it can feel even more artificial that the game uses the same solutions to such issues repeatedly, even Ellie getting irritated by how often you need to push a pallet across water to carry her to the other side.
The slow movement of ladders and pallets can definitely weaken moments of exploration, but when there is some true danger to worry about, the survival elements and sense of scarcity do come across rather well. While you are allowed to carry every weapon you find with you with only the slow swapping to limit ease of access to ones not currently set to a pocket, you’re not really able to carry much ammunition for them. Most weapons, even when fully upgraded, will barely scrape the double digits in how many bullets you can carry at a time for them, and if they do allow more it’s usually because they’re too weak without multiple shots. A well placed shotgun blast, a good snipe with a rifle or bow, or a headshot with a pistol becomes much more important to set up when failing to kill a target not only means a shot wasted but you’ll still be in danger and now down a resource. Molotov cocktails and nail bombs rely on crafting materials for their heavy damage and enemies are usually smart enough to avoid clustering so they’re not too effective, and while you will have partners to help in firefights at times, you’ll still have to clear out gunmen mostly on your own. If you’re close you can go for a take down and if you manage to hide or avoid detection it can pay to silently slink about and pick them off quietly one by one, but there are moments where you will be assaulted by a whole squad that will immediately notice you so that stealth won’t always win the day. Special circumstances allow for moments where these are more tense and varied as well like fighting through a snowstorm where both sides have limited visibility of each other or trying to push your way up a street while a sniper in a window requires you to find safe and hidden ways to travel.
Stealth is not technically required but often the best way of getting through many areas, particularly when you’re not just dealing with other humans. Those infected by the Cordyceps fungus have mutated into a small range of forms that pose different dangers. Runners still look human but charge at you in a way that applies more pressure on you to aim quickly and well, and since they come in groups they can often pile up on you if you try to be too careful with your precious bullets. What’s more dangerous though are when they’re paired with Clickers. Clickers depend on sound to find prey since their faces have mutated into full fungal growths, it often wiser to slip past them undetected since a bite from them is an instant death. Some kind checkpoint placement means you won’t lose a ton of progress to these deaths, but areas with them are still decently sized to make getting past them a challenge, and if Runners force you to fire you’ll now have Clickers heading towards your location. The Bloats are rarer and far more durable, able to hurl spore balls like life-draining grenades at you and practically ensuring you’ll be low on ammo if you don’t find a way to escape the situation. A good deal of the game is much more focused on the human interactions after the plague plunged society into such a state and the game tries to make sure you don’t forget it’s awful that humans are forced to fight other humans over simple resources, but the infected are good for providing different challenges for the third-person shooting mechanics that otherwise don’t evolve too much. There are some touches in place to ensure they aren’t too frustrating too, like Ellie will not trigger Clicker detection even if the game’s AI pathing causes her to bump into them while trying to keep up with you. While admittedly there are can be problems with her like her standing in place and blocking an exit as Runners swarm you and sometimes graphics glitch out and you can spot birds stuck in the air, the damage to immersion is more of a forgivable technical issue than deliberate design. These AI partners will fight and get in danger though when it’s appropriate so they’re not merely gameplay mechanics either, although you can spend your time lining up your shot since the time to rescue them is surprisingly generous as the game acquiesces to smart playability decisions over frustrating stakes.
Oddly enough though, this game devoted to its intimate narrative about a budding bond in the wasteland of America and a battle system defined by limitations has a competitive multiplayer mode. It’s not as straightforward as running around killing other players and it is unfortunately dead in the PS3 version of the game, but if you pick up the PS4 remaster the Factions multiplayer system is still playable. Here you have a broader goal of building up a small group of survivors presented in the form of an abstract radar, the player needing to perform well enough in multiplayer matches to earn the resources to keep their growing group of survivors fed. This is just a twist to a ranking system really with the emotional language of managing a settlement but none of the real interaction of it, but it does make the player a bit more careful in multiplayer battles that already make some decent use of the gun play system. Small teams are pitted against each other in the three available modes, survival actually still a core component and ammunition still somewhat limited. Moving through areas from the story and scrounging up more immediate bonuses from caches around the map, one mode has teams with a set amount of lives they can afford to lose before they’re wiped out while another you only have one life before you’re out of that round. The last mode where you need to locate and open an enemy lockbox by knocking down other players and taking information from them is the only one where your individual life isn’t given much importance and sloppier and less strategic play takes more root, the others keeping a bit of the thrill of clinging to your life but also needing to move to survive.
THE VERDICT: The tale of Joel and Ellie is is such a solidly constructed and emotionally intense ride that its easy for one’s opinion of The Last of Us to be swept up by it, the immersive details and natural growth able to cover up smaller moments of narrative simplicity with other characters and scenarios. Having the gun combat limited by low ammo counts makes for tense fights where you weigh up your options more and feel the threat even small groups pose, but having navigation so often lean on slowly moving ladders can make moments between a little less interesting to engage with. Overall The Last of Us still does wonderful work with its plot and crafts some action that manages to match that tone, but to call this excellent story a masterpiece would involve ignoring important pieces of its design.
And so, I give The Last of Us for PlayStation 3…
A GREAT rating. An excellent story does not exist in a vacuum, and even in The Last of Us’s case the story does deviate from its remarkably effective path of exploring Joel and Ellie’s relationship at times without as much payoff as one might like. The interactive side of The Last of Us is why I don’t think it succeeds quite as well as people who rank it higher though, and that is because moments of bland navigation do impact how you perceive the world and it staggers out the moments spent with more effective moments of reflection or action. There is some phenomenal effort put into making Ellie feel like a realistic 14 year old girl as she doesn’t always have a handle on her emotions or attention, Joel is an effective picture of a man weathered by rough experiences and as such he doesn’t immediately thaw when forced to take Ellie with him. A lot of love and care is put into the look of the world and while some story segments have pretty typical post-apocalyptic concepts take the stage for a bit, they do lead to the thrilling survivalist action that lets gunplay gel well with the broader tone of the setting. Even the multiplayer when it was still up manages to form something rather cohesive despite its break away from a deep focus on limitations, and breaking limitations isn’t bad when it’s done in favor of better play. It is very easy to get swept in how a game concludes though and the game’s powerful climax definitely resonates well because of all the effort put into key points along the adventure, but I believe one reason the game garnered such acclaim is because people remember only those points and need some prodding to realize it wasn’t a totally excellent ride throughout. The flaws are thankfully minimal and more a matter of leaning back on simple ideas that aren’t very interesting, basic cover approaches and faux resourcefulness coloring some moments less favorably in a game that otherwise does try to keep the player well fed on both gameplay and story quality.
There is a little bit of irony in that The Last of Us got so many people usually interested in gameplay only to become so heavily invested in its emotional storytelling they overlook how some interactive elements fail to excel, but I have to thank The Last of Us for also upping the bar in what players in general will expect from video game plots. There is some excellent craftmanship is what is said and what remains unsaid in the story, scenes framed to properly highlight the emotions of characters without feeling melodramatic or forced. A lot of work was put into elevating the narrative both in devoting key playable moments to it while also ensuring regular play still keeps adding to it with its feel or intertwined dialogues. Mature and complex stories were now mainstream thanks to The Last of Us and Sony began to focus heavily on them for PlayStation exclusive titles going forward, the potential of video games to be deeper experiences now better embraced by huge publishers and developers rather than being the domain of niche products and indie developers. If the broader public calling The Last of Us a masterpiece is how we got there then it is certainly not a bad choice for such elevation at least, there still being more that works in its mostly meticulous design than those moments that might make it shine less brightly when put under the microscope.